The centrepiece of Josh Ritter's fifth album is a piece of folkloric daring. Under the title of Folk Bloodbath, he gathers together the key figures of American murder ballads into one song and interweaves their stories, using a refrain from Mississippi John Hurt as the glue – and so the lives of Louis Collins, Delia Green, Stagger Lee and Billy Lyons become part of one bloody continuum. It's marvellous: seemingly solemn, but the black humour in this procession of gore is signalled by the title. So marvellous is it that it rather overshadows the rest of the songs, a fate not deserved by the likes of Lanterns, in which a spiralling, pizzicato guitar pattern echoing systems music is gradually subsumed by a rousing rocker, or Another New World, an epic maritime ballad of Ritter's own devising (though it may owe something to Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee). Stirring stuff, and food for thought, too.